You Quisling!

from Late Show with David Letterman, January 7, 1998

He just fired you! What do you mean he's...what is wrong with you...You quisling!

Norm MacDonald explains his firing from Saturday Night Live to David Letterman, who had left NBC years before and clearly has a bone to pick with some of the higher-ups of that network. MacDonald opts not to vent, to Letterman's clear consternation.

That's when Letterman calls MacDonald a "quisling," albeit in the self-mocking tone that the talk-show host has perfected. The term is interchangeable with "Benedict Arnold" and refers to a collaborationist Norwegian politician. Vidkun Quisling delivered his country to the Nazis, but MacDonald merely takes a career setback in stride.

Letterman is subtly recruiting the younger comedian for some kind of war against NBC, or against the establishment of media executives. If Letterman wanted only to call MacDonald a coward or a toady, he could have referenced "Lindbergh" or "Chamberlain" or someone like that. Instead he accuses the sanguine MacDonald of the ultimate betrayal.

For his part, MacDonald responds with drunken befuddlement (a tone that he has perfected). Whereas Letterman's comedy derives from a magisterial denigration of anyone who has the guts to sit on his couch, MacDonald wins laughs from his attitude of sheepish self-dismissal. The two funnymen are friendly antipodes for the whole exchange, even as the dictionary bit starts to expose Letterman's aggressive comparison (at 9:00).

A sage media critic reported that the only way Letterman's recent romantic scandal could destroy the man's career would be if his fellow-comedians chose to take him down. The jester after all is the second-most-powerful person in the court, after the king, and Letterman is the King of the Jesters.